Innovation Within a Large Organization

Shawn Wilkie: Welcome to the Veterinary Innovation Podcast

Ivan Zak: Hi you listening to the Innovation podcast for the first time broadcasted from another country where in Ukraine with my co-host Sean Wilkie so Sean why don’t you introduce Our Guest today

Meet our guest – Brendan Lynch of VCA

Shawn Wilkie: Yeah really excited to have Brendan join us today Brendan Lynch from VCA animal hospitals currently he’s the VP of digital strategy and client experienced prior to this Brennan was businesses with inside Procter & Gamble and before that he created several Action Sports companies so Brandon me kind of have met several times throughout the last couple of years and I always thought of you Brendan as a very Innovative guy so we’re happy to have you as one of the first guests on our podcast so welcome to the veterinary Innovation podcast

Brendan Lynch: Thanks guys I’d like to say the same in both you guys in The Innovation realm so I really excited to be part of it and looking forward to having a engaging conversation

Shawn Wilkie: Yeah it’s really cool we try to do this a week ago and I believe you were surfing and we were traveling so it didn’t work out but pretty interesting we’ve got quite the span of time zones tonight I think it’s it’s 9 p.m. here in Ukraine and what time is it in California system

Brendan Lynch: About 11 o’clock a.m.

Shawn Wilkie: I am yes yeah very strange World these time zones so I guess to get started how the hell did you transition from Action Sports to veterinary medicine

Brendan Lynch: Yeah it’s actually a little more organic than you might think but you know if I kind of go back in time you know I had sold in action sports Distribution Company back in 2004 at that time I said I want to go back to business school and while I was in business school I ended up working with an incubator that work with PNG which was launching new digital businesses one of the businesses that we launched was pets i.com that was launched in 2007 and partnership with NBC Universal and PNG at the time PNG own dimes and Eukanuba which coincidentally is now owned by Mars as is VCA animal hospitals and I mean you can do both were kind of the charter sponsors of the site and peptide was a comprehensive source of information and services that help pets their owners and their owners get the most out of life but one of the things that we had added as part of the core offerings was what we called pet pet at the time and this allowed pet owners enter their pets symptoms and get useful advice and possible diagnosis and at the time it was actually the first digital triage service in the pet space and we’ve partnered with aha to help bring the single life so that kind of got me a little bit into the pet space or actually more than a little bit but pretty deep in there but after we successfully launched pet side and I got this Pet Care bug at always been a pet lover and pet parent myself and I realize it’s these I could marry my love for pets and business I took my pet to a VC four years at that point I was already a client and I would drive by the VC a corporate office which we call the support office I think I drove by it hundreds of times and I would literally be almost dead end to it make a left turn and head on my way into my office at the time so after three years of doing this launching pets I Delight outside a light bulb went off I went gosh can I do something similar like this for bch the time they really weren’t doing anything there was even comparable to what we have done with pet side so I was brainstorming she’s like who do I know what VCA turns out that my dad actually knew Bob and who is the CEO and founder of VCA from 30 years ago they’d cross paths and Human Health Care side before he had started VCA he put in a call they never actually connected I pestered his assistant for what seemed like forever but it was probably just a month or so and I’ve gained a meeting with Bob he heard my pitch obviously liked it enough he had sent me over to Doug Drew who is currently the president of these animal hospitals with the time he was running a company called think Pat’s which was a leading veterinarian marketing analytics company and Bob Anton was one of the majority owners so we’d hit it off and a long story short Doug hired me is the VP of digital at think pets and I got to develop some really interesting products and really get my feet wet in the veterinary space think that’s was later acquired by VC a kind of after some twists and turns and it up to where I am today it’s very interesting to me because I had a recent experience with you know with a start-up and then with a larger organization and one of the things that always was fascinated with with the work that I’ve seen from the outside that you do at vcas the combination of the entrepreneurial spirit and within the large organization and as we all know there could be a lot of red tape and sort of to meet sometimes felt like walking in the mud how did you kick off the whole Alexa project and others and how did it feel to try to innovate within the large organization can you share that experience an interesting one for sure and had recently heard some say The Innovation is not an event it’s a process and it can take years well for my experience that is absolutely true and the reality is that like it said is moving organization and size of ECA is not an easy task it certainly doesn’t happen overnight so I’m going to look at my role there’s actually a great analogy I like to draw inspiration from a lot of different places and often time my team wonders what the heck I’m reading a daily basis but one of those areas was happen to co know if you guys saw Jeff Bridges who won some type of Award with the Golden Globes and during his speech earlier this year it goes on to tell the story and I think it’s a great analogy my department and my role at BCA so he goes on to tell the story about how Engineers were challenged with turning these big Oceanic tankers it took a tremendous amount of energy to turn these tankers with these big Rudders so the engineer’s came up with this great idea if they put a small Rudder on the big Rudder and a small Rudder turns the big Rudder and the big Rudder turns the ship this little Rudder is called a trim tab which I’d learned from the speech and if you look at vcas kind of this big Oceanic tanker I like to think of myself and my department and a lot of others in the support office is you know we’re really this trim tab were small but we have the ability to guide and turn the ship in the direction we want to go and our teams can help deliver and make a more delightful pet care experience but as you know and there’s a lot of large organizations realize that the reality is 84 percent of companies fail to deliver meaningful business value from their digital they’re digital transformation efforts and when you say why is this well in today’s age is not because a lack of resources for funding almost all companies have access to the same technology and you know healthy funding obviously helps but it doesn’t guarantee success so it really comes down to I think not only BCA but any organization it comes down to the company’s purpose and overall culture so we were lucky enough that senior leadership could clearly see the world was changing and we need to take risks and adapt to better meet the changing needs of our clients and what one of my previous colleagues started Aaron Frasier and I had since took over he went out and an extensive amount of research very early on and launched a client experience or what others outside of our industry think of this customer experience so we were really ahead of the curve in terms of really trying to understand what our customers wanted before it was really trendy it’s kind of one of the big buzz words today and there’s a reason for there’s a reason for that because it’s really important but we’ve been driven by what we call our client I want and our client I want focus on what Jeff Bezos calls durable client needs so these are climbing these they don’t fundamentally change from year to year and it’s not about chasing the latest technology or Trends what we look at is and then we turned and looked at and said how do we turn these client wants into an actionable strategy which we kind of communicate is making Petcare easier and more accessible and delightful so if we go kind of back to Alexa it really wasn’t a hard decision for us because it was about you we develop a voice-controlled app the question we were asking ourselves at the time and where technology and adoption outside of our space had gone was does Alexa or what Alexa make pedicure You easier and more accessible and delightful for our clients and overall we’ve set out on this journey to build a client experience platform and not just a bunch of one-off apps chasing technology but when it comes to technology was actually one of the easier projects redone and I’ll go on to kind of explain that a little bit because we didn’t start by trying to create an Alexis kill that would have been really hard to be honest because we wouldn’t have had the plumbing the foundation and in many cases even kind of the culture to accept it so we were very fortunate even before my time at VCA that prior to practice management system called wolf where and this really set the foundation for a lot of the future innovations that my team has been able to bring the life and when I come on board we identified some real key business opportunities required us to get real-time access to read and write data from with where we wanted to send text appointment reminders but not just send them and alert people we wanted to actually get back a confirmation Appliance and post that in Wolf we’re in real time so we can only create a good experience but we could help reduce the load of the staff and we also wanted to bring to life these are things that we’ve since launched years ago is the ability for clients to book appointments online based on real-time appointment availability not appointment requests or somebody gets back to you you see the time you pick the time this most convenient for you it’s booked away you go you

Shawn Wilkie: Jax for a second that’s really interesting there’s several startups you know in the space right now in the bed space that are trying to do the same thing in and think of one of the struggles is the integration into all of the different platforms, so it’s really interesting that you guys have that proprietary technology which helps you I guess helps you innovate to some degree

Contrasting innovation between startups and large organizations

Brendan Lynch: Yeah so building out the service layer of API is it allowed us to read and write data in real time you know once we solved for this and we didn’t solve for every use case when we started obviously but it really opened the door to a ton of possibilities which we’ve brought to life over time so the reality was our Alexis kill was built off of the existing apis that we develop for my VC app and online appointment booking so it took us only a few months from start to finish to build the Alexis kill obviously that wouldn’t have been possible not timeline if we had to build it from scratch build out everything really what we learned was the hardest part in terms of working with smart speakers or voice connected apps is really how to leverage and work with natural language processing creating those decision trees and write the scripts but you know kind of relate to answer the question is question is culturally our organization was already on board with the overall Klein experience strategy so this was really an easy extension of what we were doing it was kind of like we added a room to the house so to speak

Shawn Wilkie: Yeah that makes tons of sense so what’s the uptake been like what are you hearing from your clients what’s your usage like how many Unique Kind of hits to the Alexis kill have you got since you launched have any idea

Brendan Lynch: To be honest it’s one of those things that we expected to start out slow there isn’t really if you look across a lot of other skills that are out there it’s a slow uptake obviously smart speakers the fastest growing consumer technology since the smartphone but if you look at what those use cases are there really around a lot of things that you know you may do on a day-to-day basis like in my house we ask about the weather we play music using Amazon Prime and you can do the same thing obviously with Google so we’ve started out slow knowing it’s going to be a journey and a learning experience and something that we can get our feet wet in figure out where it’s going and hopefully be a little bit early and continue to iterate and do it but you know so far with it’s not something that we have all of our eggs in that basket but something that we expect to grow and evolve over time as the platform obviously increases and we learn for other opportunities to jump on board

Shawn Wilkie: Makes tons of sense do you see any other or have you guys iterated or thought of any other areas where smart speakers may play a role in that medicine for VCA yeah I mean there’s some companies out there I think it’s a pet vet and some others that are trying to do more voice-controlled tell a triage so to speak and I think there’s an opportunity around there there’s companies and Human Health Care side that are doing that we certainly have the day to do all that stuff you know we just have to pick our battles wisely so to speak and make sure that we’re putting our limited resources towards the things that we have the highest value so in smart speaker space we feel like we’re getting our feet wet we’re going to continue to learn and continue to evolve but we want to be careful not to overly invest and with the voice recognition I mean this is a Hot Topic overall in the tech industry and where I personally think that this is a major delay in any sort of profession especially taking you know those that require medical nodes that legal system and there’s just so much Revolution I think to be done do you think knowing our core customer veterinarian that the kitchen areas would be adaptive to potentially changing the way they record their records or you know some of them just switched to maybe in the notes so do you think it’s in the books for the vet soon to switch to dictate I think so I mean obviously Shawn knows it probably best in our space in terms of the dictation side but I think there’s a lot of opportunities natural language processing is beginning better and better and coupled with machine learning we see that there’s definitely a trajectory to make on the veterinarian side and the vet tech side to make medical record entry easier and faster we know that if we look on the human side which you know we have similar data and I’m sure other practice Management systems do is that entering medical records is a pain point for doctors it takes a tremendous amount of interest rate of work doctors really went to med school as you know to practice medicine not to do a lot of administrative work so I think voice interactions and machine learning absolutely has a future in our space and that you know collectively they’ll be a number of different people trying to go figure that out with different approaches which one will work is to be determined but I think it’s an exciting time and it’s exciting future and hopefully it really benefits the industry overall interesting you know to think of Brennan you know with your role in smaller companies and startups you know and then your role is kind of an innovation lead inside a large organization what are some of the challenges that you’ve experienced on both sides and what are some of the Stark differences between innovation in a small organization and innovation in a large organization like VCA

How established companies can promote an entrepreneurial spirit

Brendan Lynch: Yeah it’s a great question look at Innovation from my perspective and experience is hard it just is doesn’t matter if you’re big or small but there definitely is some of the unique advantages on either side of the coin you know I mean ultimately I can always go back that big or small you need to have a clear purpose and strategy you know without this your kind of left just drifting at Sea hoping that someone will come and rescue you and as the saying goes hope is not a strategy so you know if you have a clear purpose and strategy I honestly believe their tremendous opportunities large organizations that take more risks quickly iterate and quickly scale what successful so if we look at the larger organizations they inherently have bigger client bases this allows large organizations like VCA you’re going to look on the Human Side Steve ESS doing some interesting stuff to test New Concepts without impacting all of your clients obviously you can test in a real-world environment hopefully refine those Concepts faster and you have a higher degree of confidence because hopefully your sample size is bigger and you’re really more in the wild at that point on a financial side I know you can develop and test initiative across a large retail organization that that might cost would you know let’s just throw a number out and say a couple hundred thousand dollars and you know this is a lot of money for a small startup that may raise a few million dollars but if you look at a large retail Healthcare organization this might translate to about $20 per location so it’s relatively low risk in the big scope of a larger organization because it’s honestly if you’re looking at $20 a month probably less than their overall coffee budget for the month and then if we look on the technology side as you guys know firsthand the cost to build new applications and functionalities gone down significantly you know I think one of the biggest dilemmas that the large organizations face is a is whether you build or buy with all the SAS models out there and you’ve got companies like twilio there you don’t have to pay these large exorbitant license fees you pay as you go and you pay for what you use so it makes it more attractive in some cases to go out there and build it because it can be more cost-effective and you’re more a and you’re more agile in some cases it makes sense to go and license that but on the con side and a larger organization you have tremendous amount of technical debt and processes it in some cases need to be unraveled and these can quickly derail or delay large initiatives and if we look on a smaller organization you know often times you can just make quicker decisions and move faster a lot of times because you just have less embedded processes and in most cases are no Legacy systems to deal with and I’ve been on both sides of that and you know those can be real real problematic when you’re trying to move towards the future cuz you’re looking at significant Investments to do things that in smaller organizations is really simple to do their thing from the small side if you’re big organizations mentioned before you can make bigger bets but a small organization some of these bats can make or break the organization so I think there’s a high margin for error and overall if you look at the Innovation Gail and what makes things successful I’d watch this Ted talk to Bill gross did who’s a CEO of Ideal Labs it’s a few years ago I think you didn’t like 2015 but I think it’s still relevant today and he’d gone through and figure it out looking at his portfolio of companies because th4£œey have started hundreds of companies some successful some failed and other external companies and he really came up with you know if we went with the top five key factors the number one is timing business model and the last one is funding so this we know that team and execution are absolutely critical unloved the saying that Mike Tyson says that you know everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face well when it comes to Innovation you get punched in the face a lot so you need a team that can really roll with the punches and come out the other side but I think overall I believe Innovation can be successful both big and small organizations but the ability to be successful and innovate I think is driven primarily by the market timing and A team’s ability to execute on the idea

Shawn Wilkie: That’s awesome yeah no I agree with everything you said and I’ve seen that to talk it’s totally awesome it was really neat Brennan when I was in California to visit you I guess it was probably eight ten months ago now or maybe even a year we went out to lunch let him be in California it’s one of my favorite places I actually met my wife very close to your office which is kind of interesting but women out for lunch you had introduced me to Bob Danton it was a great pleasure to have met him and it’s must be very seeking to work with you know one of the juggernauts to the vet space what have you learned from him and what’s that experience been like working with him so closely hi I’m Bob’s are a great guy January and he’s obviously been able to do a tremendous amount of good for the industry for VCA and we have 25,000 employees so he’s been able to really positively impact so many people’s lives and obviously the lives of millions of pet parents and their pets anyone has ever met with Bob and he said it’s a it’s quite an out-of-body experience he’s really interesting character he tends to really push you but the greatest part I think that Bob brings as a mentor and a CEO and a leader in our company in the space is he’s always been very entrepreneurial and willing to take calculated risks if they make sense in in our business there isn’t although are going back to Ivan’s question larger Nation you4 get a lot of bureaucracy but we’re lucky enough within our organization and there is some that are necessary when you get to a large enough size is to make sure that the machine continues to move forward but Bob has always really great at being able to help identify and support entrepreneurial initiatives we’re kind of intrapreneurship in the company and get behind it and support it and one of the things and I think one of the reasons we’ve been so successful is both Bob and Doug have been really big Advocates of what we’re doing which helped create a Groundswell for us and help Drive the whole organization from a culture to wear client experience Innovation is really become more of a part of our cultural DNA been in

Shawn Wilkie: This has been super awesome it’s been interesting to get a little bit of a snapshot to what it’s like to work in in the largest company in the vet space it’s been really neat I’ve really enjoyed it and you know we’re almost at time so is there anything else that you want to share with us before we wrap up for tonight this morning

Brendan Lynch: I guess depending on what part of the world you’re in I think it was anything kind of like clothes and something I’ve talked to various startups about is their different models in our industry obviously obviously I’m looking at it from the lens of a large organization but as these startups figure out their business models and how they’re going to work with companies I think some are looking at it more from a product I was base of how do I create an end product that I can sell to Independent practices that comes as a fully equipped product Suite that you can kind of plug and play but with a larger organizations and you look at the VCA and the band field there’s more corporate groups forming with more private equity and VC money behind it I think some of these startups need to also look at how do they create more of a service side business which isn’t necessarily an end product that you’re delivering because if you look at organizations like BCA we have a client experience that we’re looking to deliver and we’re looking to integrate things into that we don’t have to build everything and everything doesn’t have to originated inside of the company but we have to make sure that integrates seamlessly with the company so I always encourage entrepreneurs to think about one what business model and what Market do they want to approach and what’s the right Market product fit for but how might they create services that could be integrated into these different models and you know instead figure it out how can you kind of go in on a low impact low friction and help grow your business with the other business by adding value within their ecosystem

Shawn Wilkie: Thanks so much for listening to the veterinary Innovation podcast we’re pretty social people so you’ll find us on every social media channel also you can check out our website at the veterinary Innovation podcast.com thanks so much for listening.